Marketing violence

The rants of crazed Republicans in the United States about the legitimacy of rape has reminded me of the struggle of women in India against a blame-the-victim mentality that still plagues both gender relationships and the attitudes of public security officials, as documented in this recent article. Heres a billboard from Varanasi I found a few years back. It would be nice if tacky advertising was as far as it went. But on that trip I wrote about dowry violence, and still vividly remember the blistered flesh of a woman in a Methodist hospital in Mathura whod had her face burned by her in-laws in an accident at home. And what Nobel laureate Amartya Sen dubbed the missing womenthe more than 100 million women in Asia who have been selectively aborted in the womb or killed shortly after birth in order not to burden families with a girl childreminds us that this isnt just extremist politicians like Aiken and Ryan and their religious backers who push policies that do violence to women. Its much more insidious. But many in India are fighting back, supporting dowry-free weddings, for example. What are we doing in the U.S.? Perhaps the easiest and most urgent step is to defeat the misogynists at the polls in November.